On Tuesday the longlist for the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize will be announced. For the third year in a row I’m running a shadow panel, and it’s composed of the same four wonderful book bloggers who joined me last year: Paul Cheney of Halfman, Halfbook, Annabel Gaskell of Annabookbel, Clare Rowland of A Little Blog of Books, and Dr. Laura Tisdall.

This year we’re going to do things slightly differently: we plan to split up the longlist, taking two to three titles each, so that between us we will have read them all and can announce our own preferred shortlist before the official shortlist is announced in March. At that point we’ll catch up by (re)reading the six shortlisted books, each reviewing the ones we haven’t already. Essentially, I’m adding an extra stage of shadow panel judging, simply because I can. I hope it will be fun – and also less onerous, in that we should get a leg-up on the shortlist and not have to read all six books in March‒April, which has proved to be a challenge in the past.

My Wellcome Prize hopefuls are all the fiction or nonfiction titles I’ve read on a medical theme that were published in the UK in calendar year 2018. I have put asterisks beside the 12 books in this post that I predict for the longlist. (The combination of wishful thinking and likelihood means that these are not exclusively my personal favorites.)

Below is a list of the books I’ve already featured on the blog in some way, with links to my coverage and a few-word summary of their relevance.

Other eligible books that I have read but not happened to mention on the blog:

In Shock by Rana Awdish: The doctor became the patient when Awdish, seven months pregnant, was rushed into emergency surgery with excruciating pain due to severe hemorrhaging into the space around her liver, later explained by a ruptured tumor. Having experienced brusque, cursory treatment, even from colleagues at her Detroit-area hospital, she was convinced that doctors needed to do better. This memoir is a gripping story of her own medical journey and a fervent plea for compassion from medical professionals.

Doctor by Andrew Bomback: Part of the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series, this is a wide-ranging look at what it’s like to be a doctor. Bomback is a kidney specialist; his wife is also a doctor, and his father, fast approaching retirement, is the kind of old-fashioned, reassuring pediatrician who knows everything. Even the author’s young daughter likes playing with a stethoscope and deciding what’s wrong with her dolls. In a sense, then, Bomback uses fragments of family memoir to compare the past, present and likely future of medicine.

A Moment of Grace by Patrick Dillon [skimmed]: A touching short memoir of the last year of his wife Nicola Thorold’s life, in which she battled acute myeloid leukemia. Dillon doesn’t shy away from the pain and difficulties, but is also able to summon up some gratitude.

Get Well Soon: Adventures in Alternative Healthcare by Nick Duerden: British journalist Nick Duerden had severe post-viral fatigue after a run-in with possible avian flu in 2009 and was falsely diagnosed with ME / CFS. He spent a year wholeheartedly investigating alternative therapies, including yoga, massage, mindfulness and meditation, visualization, talk therapy and more. He never comes across as bitter or sorry for himself. Instead, he considered fatigue a fact of his new life and asked what he could do about it. So this ends up being quite a pleasant amble through the options, some of them more bizarre than others.

*Sight by Jessie Greengrass [skimmed]: I wanted to enjoy this, but ended up frustrated. As a set of themes (losing a parent, choosing motherhood, the ways in which medical science has learned to look into human bodies and minds), it’s appealing; as a novel, it’s off-putting. Had this been presented as a set of autobiographical essays, perhaps I would have loved it. But instead it’s in the coy autofiction mold where you know the author has pulled some observations straight from life, gussied up others, and then, in this case, thrown in a bunch of irrelevant medical material dredged up during research at the Wellcome Library.

*Brainstorm: Detective Stories From the World of Neurology by Suzanne O’Sullivan: Epilepsy affects 600,000 people in the UK and 50 million worldwide, so it’s an important condition to know about. It is fascinating to see the range of behaviors seizures can be associated with. The guesswork is in determining precisely what is going wrong in the brain, and where, as well as how medicines or surgery could address the fault. “There are still far more unknowns than knowns where the brain is concerned,” O’Sullivan writes; “The brain has a mind of its own,” she wryly adds later on. (O’Sullivan won the Prize in 2016 for It’s All in Your Head.)

I’m also currently reading and enjoying two witty medical books, The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine by Thomas Morris, and Chicken Unga Fever by Phil Whitaker, his collected New Statesman columns on being a GP.

Four additional books I have not read but think might have a chance of making the longlist:

Primate Change: How the World We Made Is Remaking Us by Vybarr Cregan-Reid

Though I’m often wary of war fiction – can anything new still be written about World War I? – I was drawn to The Winter Soldier by the enthusiastic American reviews and the medical theme. The protagonist of psychiatrist Daniel Mason’s third novel, Lucius Krzelewski, comes from southern Polish nobility. In the 1910s medicine was a path for those seeking social mobility, but for Lucius neurology study is a way out of his stifling aristocratic household. Under Herr Doktor Zimmer’s tutelage in Vienna, he experiments on ways to make blood vessels visible. Dismayed to learn that Zimmer believes the “mermaid” in the medical school’s anatomical museum is real, he hurries to enlist when war begins in 1914.

As a 22-year-old medical lieutenant he’s stationed at a church turned into a regimental hospital at Lemnowice. Here Sister Margarete has been making do without a doctor in charge for two months. She’s been performing amputations and setting fractures in a lice-ridden building where hunger and typhoid are never far away. Lucius is ashamed of his ignorance compared to this skilled nurse; though he has textbook knowledge, he has no practical experience and has to learn on the job.

The following winter a Hungarian soldier suffering from “nervous shock” but no visible wounds is brought in, a sheaf of accomplished drawings padding his coat. For Lucius and Margarete, Sergeant József Horváth poses a particular challenge, which makes his recovery seem more like a resurrection: “they were both falling a little bit in love with their silent visitor or, more, with the cure that they had wrought.” Even as Lucius and Margarete fall in love and steal moments alone, they regret they couldn’t do more for Horváth. When Lucius and Margarete are separated, he vows to find her again – and make things right with Horváth.

I loved the novel’s first half, with its gallows humor, memorable scenes of gruesome medical procedures, and bleak conditions so convincing you’ll find yourself itching right along with the lice-plagued patients. But at about the halfway point the pace changes dramatically. Years pass and Lucius has various deployments and hospital positions. Curiously, although so much is happening to him outwardly, he’s stalled internally – haunted by thoughts of Margarete and Horváth. Perhaps this is why I felt the narrative slowed to a crawl. I could barely force myself to read more than five or 10 pages in a sitting, and the novel as a whole took me much longer to read than normal. Or maybe I was just missing Margarete, the most vibrant character.

Early on I was reminded of Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridgeand Hubert Mingarelli’s A Meal in Winter, lesser-known war novels in which the stark beauty of the writing tempers the somber subject matter. Partway through I started thinking of Ambrose Parry’s The Way of All Flesh, in which an unqualified female outshines a male in medical knowledge. By the end I was recalling epic separation-filled romances like The English Patient and Birdsong.

Though the novel’s second half never matched the strength of the first, I was at least pleased that Mason avoided a clichéd, Hollywood-ready ending in favor of a more fitting one that, while still somewhat far-fetched, makes sense of the title’s emphasis. This is a moving story of the physical and psychological effects of war, and I would certainly read more by Mason.

My rating:

The Winter Soldier was published in the UK by Mantle on October 18th. With thanks to the publisher for the free copy for review.